Muslim Women’s Writing from across South and Southeast Asia

Feroza Jussawalla, Ph.D., University of Utah, 1980, is Professor Emerita at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She has taught at the University level for more than forty years, beginning with her years as a T.A. at the University of Utah, then at the University of Texas at El Paso (1980-2021) and as Full Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM, 2001-2021. She is the author of Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in English (Peter Lang, 1984), co-editor of Interviews with Writers of the Postcolonial World, (University Press of Mississippi, 1992), Emerging South Asian Women Writers (Peter Lang, 2017), and Memory, Voice and Identity: Muslim Women’s Writing from Across the Middle East (Routledge, 2021). She also edited Mr. Naipaul’s interviews given through his career to various newspapers and journals into Conversations with V.S. Naipaul (Mississippi, 1997), which was both translated into French, and featured on Sir Naipaul’s Nobel Prize page. She has co-taught an NEH Summer Seminar and an NEH Institute on Postcolonial Literatures housed at the School for Asian and African Studies in London. She has also won prestigious grants such as the Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy and the Alumni Teaching Award at the University of New Mexico (2014). She is the author of more than three hundred articles and book chapters, primarily on Indian Writing in English, Postcolonial Literatures in English, Indian Critical Theory, D.H. Lawrence and Muslim Women’s writing, written from 1979 onward. Her book of poems is Chiffon Saris (2003) published by the Kolkotta Writer’s Workshop and the Toronto South Asian Review. She has published several individual poems, most recently on-line with Silver Birch Press https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com. Doaa Omran’s research interests include postcolonial theory, feminism, and the Middle Ages. She did her master’s and PhD at the University of New Mexico. She wrote her ground-breaking dissertation titled Female Hero Mega-Archetypes in the Medieval European Romance (2019) on Quranic and Biblical female characters as mega-archetypes in Medieval literature. Her MA thesis was titled Occidental Encounters: Early Nineteenth-Century Egyptian travelers to Europe (2012). She is currently a visiting lecturer at the same university where she received her master’s and doctorate. She received her BA in English language and literature at Alexandria University, Egypt. Her awards include: a Fulbright Scholarship (2007), the Women of Color award at UNM (2012), Dean of Graduate Studies Dissertation Award (2016) and first place in sIdentity: Muslim Women’s Writing from across the Middle East. She was also invited by Women Studies: an Interdisciplinary Journal to be Guest co-editor of the special issue Muslim Women Speaking Persistently. Her book chapters include "The Woman from Tantoura: An Autotheoretical Reading in the Art of Resistance," "Ambivalence in the Poems of the Slave-Knight ‘Antarah Ibn Shaddād: An Engagement with Historicism(s), “Muslim Face, White Mask: Out al-Kouloub al-Dimerdashiyyah’s Ramza as a Mimic (Wo)man," and "Anachronism and Anatopism in the French Vulgate Cycle and the Forging of English Identity through Othering Muslims/Saracens." She is the administrator of the Facebook group "CompLitScholars" which serves a community of more than 1,000 international researchers.

Introduction

Feroza Jussawalla and Doaa Omran with assistance from Gerard A. Lavin

India

Chapter 1:

From Ismat Chugtai to Samina Ali and Monica Ali: Women’s Communities, Contexts, and Conflicts

Feroza Jussawalla

Chapter 2:

"Based on Love and Truth": Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Theological Negotiations in Sultana’s Dream

Cynthia A. Leenerts

Kashmir

Chapter 3:

Critique of Exclusionary Women’s Nationalism in Kashmir, and Reconceptualizing the Relationship Between State and Non-State Women Actors

Nyla Ali Khan

Chapter 4:

Conflict and Women in Kashmir: A Study of Ather Zia’s Poetry

Shruti Sareen

Chapter 5:

Songs and Slogans of Protest: Exploring Kashmiri Women’s Resistance(s) to the Indian State

Samreen Mushtaq

Pakistan and Afghanistan

Chapter 6:

The Trade of Giving Up Being a Woman: A Transnational Antiracist Reading of Nadia Hashimi’s The Pearl That Broke Its Shell

Umme Al-wazedi

Chapter 7:

Women, Violence, and Conflict: A Study of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Muddasir Ramzan

Chapter 8:

Poetics of Resistance by the Muslim Woman

Sobia Khan

Chapter 9:

The Empowerment of Women in the Controversial Landscape of Pakistan in The Upstairs Wife

Heba Abdel-Aziz

Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

Chapter 10:

A Mother in a War: Jahanara Imam’s Ekattorer Dinguli

Debali Mookerjea-Leonard

Chapter 11:

Encountering the "Pseudo Gatekeepers": Islamism and Secularism in Identity Construction of Bangladeshi Women in Fiction

Hafiza Nilofar Khan

Chapter 12:

Writing Rights: Women and Community in Sharmila Seyyid’s Ummath

Sk Sagir Ali

Indonesia and Malaysia

Chapter 13:

Being Religious, Cool, and Global in the Eyes of Indonesian Muslim Woman Writers: Negotiating Religion and Popular Lifestyle in Islamic Pop Novels

Diah Ariani Arimbi

Chapter 14:

Reclaiming Islamic Religious Interpretations through Women’s Experience: Life, Activism, and Authorship of Three Indonesian Muslim Feminists

Lien Iffah Naf’atu Fina & Yuyun Sri Wahyuni

Chapter 15:

Malaysian Muslim Women’s Writing: A History of Colonization, Decolonization, and Globalization

Nor Faridah Abdul Manaf & Ruzy Suliza Hashim

Chapter 16:

Negotiating Conflicts amongst Muslim Female Characters in Malay Romance Novels: A Narratological Perspective

Jariah Mohd. Jan and Diana Abu Ujum

Burma, Brunei, and the Philippines

Chapter 17:

Agency of Rohingya Muslim Women Survivors of Genocide in Myanmar

Afroza Anwary

Chapter 18:

Beyond Intractability: Muslim Women Negotiating Identities in Brunei Darussalam

Hannah Ming Yit Ho

Chapter 19:

Reading Her Face: Affect Theory in Narratorial Representation in Malaka Gharib's Graphic Novel I was their American Dream

Wessam Elmiligi

Comparative Perspectives

Chapter 20:

Partition Historiographies in Qurratulain Hayder’s River of Fire (India) and Radwa Ashour’s Tantoura (Palestine): Assertion vs. Subalterity

Doaa Omran

Chapter 21:

Muslim Women Re-membering the Nation, Writing Their Transnational Selves in Diasporic Memoirs: Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days and Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey

Bhawana Pillai

Chapter 22:

Women’s Narratives and the Politics of the Personal in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column and Siti Rukiah’s The Fall and the Heart

Amany El-Sawy